Big-screen filmmakers are regularly hired to film 30 and 60 second television commercials, and many of the bigger spots premiere during the NFL’s annual mega event, the Super Bowl. So which of the commercials shown during the big game were directed by movie directors? Which commercials were helmed by the directors of such films as The Bourne Identity, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Thing, Little Miss Sunshine, Maleficent, andNightmare on Elm Street? Which TV spots were directed by the cinematographers behind The Dark Knight trilogy and Lost in Translation, and the two-time Academy Award winning production designer responsible for creating the worlds of James Cameron’s Avatar and Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland? As with previous years, we’ve compiled a list for you to enjoy. Find out the 2015 Super Bowl Commercials directors after the jump.

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In his directorial debut, Christopher Nolan‘s longtime DP Wally Pfister serves up a dire warning about all the things that can go wrong when someone other than Christopher Nolan tries to make a Christopher Nolan movie. Transcendence is Inception, in spirit if not in plot, only without the heart, style, intelligence, or grace.

Wally Pfister‘s debut directorial effort, Transcendence, opens in less than a month — on April 17 we’ll see what Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer has come up with for his heady sci-fi feature. But in the meantime, two Transcendence viral videos and a featurette give us a few more things to think about. Read More »

Here’s the latest full trailer for Wally Pfister‘s Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp as an AI designer who is killed in “real” life, but preserved as a digital consciousness. Pfister makes the leap from cinematographer to director here, but you can still see visual traces of his long run shooting for Christopher Nolan. This film looks like the dark thriller counterpart to Spike Jonze’s Her, as Depp’s character is killed at the hands of anti-tech terrorists, leading his consciousness down a pathway where it can expand well past the limitations of human biology. Read More »

Briefly: We’ll get a second trailer for Wally Pfister‘s first directorial effort, Transcendence, later this week. For now you can check out the first poster for the film, which looks like the sort of image that might have decorated a paperback copy of a William Gibson novel twenty years ago, or maybe a cover of Wired. It’s essentially a graphic interpretation of that creepy image above, in which Johnny Depp‘s head is wired up for some serious computer interface. Read More »

After a couple days marked by minor teasers for Transcendence, we’ve now got a full trailer that uses actual footage rather than voiceover and stock images and illustrations.

Christopher Nolan’s longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister makes his directorial debut here, and in the cast and style of the footage there’s a very recognizable set of faces and characteristics. Johnny Depp stars as a scientist who is incarnated as a computer-housed intelligence, with anti-tech terrorists on his trail and potentially a non-human agenda of his own. Cillian Murphy, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Kate Mara, and Paul Bettany are among the supporting cast.

If you’ve ever worried that technology might be moving too fast, that computer intelligence could soon move so far past human intelligence that we’re left cowering in the dust, that the machines will then turn around and destroy us, their makers — well, then Kate Mara has some terrible news for you.

According to a viral video from the mysterious revolutionary organization RIFT, computers are indeed the number one threat to humankind right now, and the only way to save our species may be to stop the scientists and unplug the machines. Watch the latest teaser for Wally Pfister‘s Transcendenceafter the jump. Check it out after the jump.

Countless sci-fi movies have explored the possible consequences of the technological singularity, the moment when the machines have officially outpaced the humans who created them. But in Wally Pfister‘s Transcendence, the first machine to achieve sentience isn’t really a machine at all. It’s a controversial scientist, played by Johnny Depp.

Dr. Will Caster (Depp) is an AI researcher whose groundbreaking experiments have caught the attention of some angry, anti-tech terrorists. When the bad guys come to destroy him, Caster tries to get away by uploading his own consciousness into a machine — whereupon his innate ambition becomes warped into something far bigger and more terrifying. Watch the first teaser after the jump.

Update: There’s a second teaser that features voiceover from Morgan Freeman. We’ve added it below.

It really says something about Johnny Depp‘s career that his role in Transcendence as a megalomaniacal digital god (or something) is the least weird he’s looked in a while. The role doesn’t require him to don gold teeth, or vampire fangs, or ten pounds of white makeup and a bird on his head. Instead, as director Wally Pfister puts it, Transcendence has him with “just a pair of glasses on and a pretty normal haircut.”

But don’t let that fool you: Transcendence sounds like a trip. The script, by Jack Paglen, centers on an AI researcher (Depp) who uploads his own consciousness into the computer when his life falls into danger. Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, and Cillian Murphy also star, and you can see all of them in two new images after the jump.